Top Down (11 page)

The only personal memory of the town Marti shared with me now involved a race against an older neighborhood boy when she was eight to the tower steps of Lindenwald, the former Van Buren mansion. Marti lost the race and then punched the kid in the stomach when he tried to kiss her as “a first-place trophy.”

Marti stopped the Pontiac now at the traffic light. There were a few stores, a bank, a couple of cafés, the city hall, and the library radiating for a block in the four directions of the intersection. All were lit up with lights and holiday decorations.

Then she gunned the big wagon and resumed her rat-tat-tat talk.

“I was in this car. My mother was driving me from the airport just like I’m doing with you now. Just the two of us. ‘Hold your breath, Marti, while I show you something,’ she said. Nothing else was said for the next few blocks until she swung onto a major blacktop road, drove for a few hundred feet, and then turned off abruptly into a driveway and stopped.

“ ‘How do you like it?’ That’s what she asked me, Jack. ‘How do you like it?’ ”

Marti said she could not see what there was to like. Through the darkening gray atmosphere there stood a modest, one-story faded cream-colored wooden house set back from the road fifteen yards or so.

“I had no idea what was going on, what she was talking about. ‘Welcome to our new home. The treatment just wasn’t working for your father in Singapore, Marti. We just closed on it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you that before. But he needs very special care that is only available here with a particular doctor.’ ”

Marti said she looked at the house. It didn’t have a single Christmas light or any other decoration. No lights of any other kind were on, either.

“Mom said there’s a doctor—a psychiatrist—in Boston who is an expert on Dad’s kind of disorder. His name is Reynolds. He believes it may be possible for my dad to make real progress. He has some theories that he’s working on. He has already been here once to see Dad and is coming back this afternoon. Maybe Dad will be going into a hospital in Boston soon.”

Marti then explained to me some of the chronology of what had been happening. She said her mother had called her from Singapore in mid-November to report with alarm that her dad was getting much worse. A few days later Marti happened to see the story in the Philadelphia newspaper about the press club panel that led to her calling me.

“After she showed me the house, Mom warned me about what I was going to actually see when I saw Dad this time. She said, ‘It may be all in his head but it’s affecting his body like a regular disease. You will see … he’s not doing well at all. Not physically
or
mentally.’ ”

Still in the car, Marti told me to look over at another of Kinderhook’s Van Buren landmarks—one of the few she knew.

“That’s Lindenwald, the old Van Buren place. The one I was telling you about. The one with the tower.” I saw the tower with the house, which looked huge, old, cold, and neglected.

Marti stopped the car in the driveway of Lindenwald and finished the story of her arrival in Kinderhook.

“We got to the house where my grandmother and the family lived, where Dad was waiting for me. I dumped my only piece of baggage and raced as fast as I could into the sitting room.

“ ‘Dad, hi …’ And I stopped talking and running. I had to choke down a scream of horror.

“There in a chaise lounge a couple of yards away was a shriveled-up shadow of a man laid out under a blanket with his eyes closed. On his head was the dark brown snap-brimmed felt ‘agent’s hat’ he always wore in public when on duty. I looked immediately for a lobotomy scar. There was none. Thank the good Lord. That was the only relief I felt.

“He seemed to move slightly to the sound of my cry and barely opened his eyes. He reminded me of the pictures I had seen of people who had just been released from Nazi concentration camps.

“ ‘Is that you, sweetheart?’ He said it in a barely audible whisper.
Sweetheart
. That was what he had always called me. I was his sweetheart.

“I turned away from him and ran from the room.”

Marti put her hands on the top of the station wagon’s steering wheel and cried and cried. I leaned over and put an arm over her shoulders and pulled her my way.

“It was two days before I could stand to look at him, my poor sick daddy,” Marti said after a while. “We’ve talked a little but I have still—in ten days—to really touch him.”

N
OW IT WAS
my turn to see Van Walters. Almost, but not quite yet. Marti had a plan.

“Let’s not tell anybody—except Dad, of course—that you’re a reporter” were Marti’s last instructions as we prepared to get out of the car at her grandmother’s house.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “The
Tribune
has a policy against interviewing news sources under false pretenses.”

“Are you or are you not here to help my dad?” she asked sternly.

“Sure, you bet, sure,” said I, telling what I believed—hoped, honestly—was only a half lie.

She shot back: “Remember, please, there are no news sources here or anywhere else involved in this—right now, at least. This is personal.”

Personal? Okay, okay. “But how do we explain who I am and why I’m here?” I said quickly.

“You’re my new boyfriend.”

I smiled. So did she. “Aren’t I a bit too old for you?”

“How old
are
you?”

“Thirty,” I said. “You?”

“Twenty. But no problem. Fortunately, I look older than I am and you look younger than you are.”

That was not true. Or was it? Maybe, I let it go. I was learning quickly that she had a way of getting what she wanted.

“We’ll tell everybody that we met at Penn,” she said. “You’re a Hemingway scholar working on a master’s.”

There was a lie that I could live with—if not huff and puff about.

R
OSEMARY
W
ALTERS REALLY
was as attractive a woman as Marti had described. I had a brief introductory chat with her when we got inside the house. But there was an inanimate quality to her that was unexpected. Marti seemed so full of energy and action while her mother seemed completely out of energy and disinterested in action. Also, there were signs of the havoc of drinking in Rosemary Walters’s skin and eyes. There was a smell of liquor on her though she was not drunk. I was hit—suddenly, unexpectedly—by a wave of sympathy and understanding for this woman, knowing as I did the details of what Marti had told me she’d been through with her damaged, dying husband. Every minute of their five years together since the assassination must have been a desperate existence for both of them.

I only exchanged quick hellos with everyone else on the way up to the bedroom I was assigned. Marti gave me a quick pass-by introduction to an elderly woman who was her grandmother but to no one else.

I knew Marti’s dad was somewhere in the house, but clearly I was not to see him until later.

The huge white frame three-story house seemed to have dozens of rooms, most of them small. Mine was only slightly larger than the cubbyhole I’d slept in as a marine lieutenant at a makeshift bachelor officer’s quarters on Okinawa in 1960.

Marti finalized my orders of the day while escorting me to my room. Dr. Reynolds, the psychiatrist, was driving in from Boston and was due in Kinderhook shortly. She wanted us both to meet and talk privately with him before I met her dad. It was much too cold to talk outside and, while there were plenty of private places in the family house, Marti wanted the chat to happen somewhere else. So, on her mother’s suggestion, they would meet in a quiet corner of the Dutch Reformed Church in the center of town.

“Mom said it’s always open and kept warm for anyone who wants to come in, but she said nobody much ever does,” Marti explained. “We should have complete privacy.”

And we did. A sign outside told me the church was organized in 1677; the current sanctuary, the last of a couple of rebuildings, had been there since 1869. It was warm and deserted. I followed Marti directly to the pew used by Martin Van Buren and his family, first one on the left closest to the pulpit. On the wall to the right of the pulpit was a six-foot-wide replica of the Ten Commandments painted in Old English lettering.

I was taking notice of the greenery, candles, and an array of baby Jesus, wise men, manger, and other symbols of Christmas when Dr. Reynolds arrived.

Psychiatrists are not the favorite people of those of us who
cover news for a living. As an old courthouse reporter in Dallas told me, “Shrinks don’t know yes or no for an answer.” But the upside is that most of them are characters. Funny, smart, eccentric, flamboyant, effusive. I knew on sight that Dr. Frederic Reynolds fit the bill. He was a perfect psychiatrist, a man in his late forties with a grin, a full head of long black hair, a beard, and a long black leather overcoat. He could be cast in a Charles Boyer movie on his appearance alone.

Marti introduced me to him as a friend she wanted to be present for this chat and, as she did so, I realized that the boyfriend ID was not going to work for Reynolds—not for long, at least. He would be smart enough to realize what Marti and I had stupidly failed to focus on: the obvious fact that it was my Love Field experience as a reporter with Van Walters that would be at the heart of what we were going to be talking about. But I figured we would deal with that when we had to.

After a few preliminaries, Marti and I listened to Reynolds explain what he thought was going on with Van Walters.

“I believe your father is suffering from a form of mental disorder with the symptoms of shell shock, though not fully understood in other contexts—not yet, at least. It is a syndrome, a disorder whose symptoms usually spring from specific horrendous actions on a battlefield—but we now think they may come from other happenings as well. For example, a police officer in a violent situation who has to fire his weapon resulting in the death of a person—possibly an innocent person.
That is only one of many potential examples. Your father’s situation with the Plexiglas covering over the Kennedy presidential limousine could be another.”

Guilt was at the heart of it, he said. “Guilt is the driving force of all human relationships, beginning with man and woman up to and through parent and child, worker and employer, soldier and commander. I may add to that list, of course, the doctor and the patient and just about any other set of pairings.”

The doctor spoke in what sounded to my movie-fan ear like the accent of a German submarine commander; smooth, forceful, precise, in control under depth-charge fire.

“In your father’s case, guilt itself, through a kind of shell shock malady that went from mind to body, is the potential killer, pure and simple—awful and complicated.”

That made Marti shudder and turn away. I felt like I needed to say something—but what? I was caught between being a supportive friend and a reporter. Silence was the only way to be of assistance right now, but questioning was the only way to move the story along.

Reynolds preempted my decision by moving on himself. “We are beginning, I believe, to expand our understanding of this kind of terrible result of a guilt that is so pathological, it leads to physical disease.”

“They gave Dad drugs and shocked him with a machine, didn’t they?” Marti suddenly barked at the doctor.

“I am not privy to all of the prior treatment protocols that
were used on your father,” the doctor said. “But based on my examination of him, I would say there are definite signs that he has undergone extensive electroshock treatment.”

“I saw those scars on his temples from the very beginning,” Marti said. “I hate it that they’ve done that.”

“There are perfectly legitimate and constructive uses for electroshock treatments for some patients in some situations,” Reynolds said, perhaps trying to reassure her.

“What medicines have they given him?”

“Mostly a barbiturate, Sodium Pentothal.”

“Tell me about Sodium Pentothal,” Marti demanded.

Reynolds, smiling and patient, said: “Technically called thiopental, it became the first of the really popular anesthetic drugs for animals. In humans, it was mostly prescribed for minor or short-term purposes such as cesarean section births. But with different dosages and combinations it is used for all kinds of things including a truth serum. The psychiatric use, quite simply, has been to calm people down enough to help them recall experiences or memories they may have repressed.”

“LSD?” I asked. “I read where some psychiatrists are experimenting with LSD on Vietnam vets—those having serious mental problems. Is that right?”

Reynolds only got half a sentence out: “That is true—”

“That would make him really crazy! Do not let anybody give my dad LSD!” Marti’s voice was somewhere between a marine DI and a hysterical child. “Did they already do that in Singapore?”

“I don’t believe so,” Reynolds said calmly.

“What about psychiatric therapy, with or without drugs—trying to talk it out of him?” Marti asked. “Have they tried that on Dad?”

“Yes. That’s been prescribed and utilized more than once.”

“Did it do any good?”

Reynolds shook his head. “His situation has continued to worsen.”

“They gave him a lobotomy in Singapore, didn’t they?”

Reynolds moved his head slightly. “No, they did not. In fact, I understand it was a move toward such a possibility that caused your mother to bring your father back here from Singapore.”

“Are you sure they didn’t?” Marti persisted.

“Certain,” Reynolds said. “There would be a cutting scar right down the center of his forehead if such a thing had been done.”

Marti sat back down in a defeated slump. End of attack mode—for now. “You know, Mom has problems herself but she definitely made the right decision to get him out of there.”

She had directed that to me. “It certainly seems that way to me—yes,” I responded.

To Reynolds, Marti said: “Even without a lobotomy, they’ve almost killed him, haven’t they? With drugs and electricity. Put him at death’s door. He is dying.”

Reynolds ignored that. “The important point is that I am involved now at your mother’s request. I am trying to develop new forms of treatment for your father and others similarly
afflicted. There is an escalating effort because of the war in Vietnam and the casualties of the mind it is producing …”